Business processes are collections of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product, or serve a particular goal for a particular customer or customers, including customers internal and external to an organization. A business process can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points that can be resolved with rules based on the data in the process. Business processes are often modeled to test newly developed business processes or to improve process efficiency and quality of an existing business process. Process analysts are responsible for creating the initial flow of a business process and documenting its steps. This also includes identifying and defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and high level rules that define the routing artifacts of the business process. Process analysts can benefit from the use of business process models to perform simulations to calculate and estimate return on investment (ROI).
Currently available business process modeling functionality allows for pre-execution scenario modeling followed by simulation. Post-execution optimization is available based on the analysis of instances of the simulation that produce performance metrics. To model a business process, the business process is first created using a composition tool. Scenarios are defined using different rules and sample data, and the created business process is deployed to a runtime environment. The composition tool is then set aside and a simulation tool is used to execute the simulation based on the scenarios. The results of the simulation are then analyzed to determine performance. Current methods for creating business process models and simulating the created models can be slow and cumbersome, requiring a process analyst to manage different tools that do not interact with each other within their environments, but which rely on their separately generated work products.